Last December, a couple of weeks before Christmas, I left my water bottle at the gym. As we drove home, my husband said, “Do you want to go back?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll get it tomorrow.” But I was angry at Eric for not turning around. A minute later, I was crying.

“I’m going back,” he said.

“No!” I said. Because my anxiety wasn’t about the water bottle. It was about the fact that our daughter had died, and some days I just couldn’t take any more loss.

Earlier, leaving the gym, we had seen a long-limbed and messy-haired young woman who looked to be in her mid-20s, as our daughter, Kiki, had been.

“That girl reminds me of Kiki,” Eric said.

I had seen her in the gym, noticed how she was trying to get a broken treadmill to work before she threw up her hands and made a frustrated but cute face, sort of laughing to herself. Something Kiki would have done.

And then, in the gym parking lot, a memory from my old life: the feeling of picking my daughter up somewhere, seeing her walk toward the car, anticipating the moment she would get in — the smell of her hair, the sound of her voice. I could touch her then, put my hand on her arm, feel her soft sweater. There would be things to tell, to laugh about. Somewhere to go, together.

I used to be the mother of a 25-year-old. I used to have a young person who loved me, belonged to me, connected me to the world of young people. It’s not that I don’t know other young people, but mine is gone, lost suddenly to anaphylactic shock from an allergic reaction.

My young person, the one who would put her hand out to stop me from crossing on the red light when we walked in the city. The one with my name tattooed in a heart on the inside of her elbow. The one who brought me dispatches from the land of the young, a place I am endlessly curious about but can’t visit on my own.

I called the gym from the car. The woman who answered was friendly and helpful, putting me on hold while she went to look for my bottle in the bathroom, where I thought I had left it. When she came back and said it wasn’t there, she sounded annoyed. And that’s when I realized it was by the door in the lobby. But she was no longer interested in being helpful, and I hung up feeling tired.

Later, at home, I saw a photo on my phone from Dec. 12, 2022, exactly a year earlier, of Kiki flopped on the couch in sweats, hair in a ponytail, smiling up at me. A cardboard box of ornaments on the floor beside her, our tablecloth with the elves and candy canes draped over the armrest by her head. We had been laughing about how Christmas is hard work, all that decorating, and how we needed to eat and rest and make pecan squares and watch some old “Wife Swap” episodes.

Eric was away. She had come up for the night to our home in Keene, N.H., from hers in Northampton, Mass., to put up the tree with me. And now this was all I had: a picture of her on the couch, and another, of the finished tree.

We often don’t get to know when it’s the last time. There must have been a last time I played tennis with my father, a final trip to the movies with my mother, before I lost them both to dementia. A last dinner with my friend Julie before her cancer diagnosis changed everything, our daughters still little, the four of us laughing around the table when we thought we had so much time.

I wasn’t paying attention then; I didn’t think I needed to.

The last time I was with Kiki was the day after Christmas when she was getting ready to head home. I had put an art book out on the coffee table for us to look at together, one I had bought months before, knowing she would love it. We had the same taste and could love things in the same way; I didn’t have that with anyone else.

“Let’s look at this now,” I said, “before you go.”

We sat on the couch with the book between us, turning the pages and talking about each picture, laughing in the way you do when you know the other person sees something exactly the same way, sees why it’s funny and sad at the same time.

I felt echoes of the thousands of times we had done this since she was a baby. All through the growing-up years, with a stack of library books on the coffee table, reading and talking. And then when she was older, we still looked at books together — photos, art, recipes. So many hours side by side, our bodies touching.

There’s a last photo from that weekend. I had said, “Let’s take more pictures this time, because I always forget to take pictures until it’s too late.” Which was true. She would be running out, and I wouldn’t want to delay her.

That day she wasn’t in a rush, and I said, “Wait, let’s get a shot of you and me.”

In that last picture, we’re in the kitchen, our arms around each other, a beam of light from the ceiling fixture streaking across the image. My friend pointed out it’s really a picture of us three, because Eric is behind the camera and our smiles are for him. We’re laughing at something he said. It was a good day.

Now he and I are struggling. On the outside, we probably look like we’re doing OK. Not that anyone is looking, because these days we’re on the road. In December, we were far from home, camping in our R.V. in Gulf Shores, Ala., where no one knew us. We had planned it that way. In a campground it’s not a traditional Christmas, so maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much.

Eric and I are so careful with each other now. We feel the other’s fragility, how we’re on the brink of shattering. We can’t fall apart at the same time though, or there will be nothing to hold us up. So we take turns.

All those years of wishing he would notice more, ask me about myself, and now that’s what we do, tend to each other. Our days are made up of small kindnesses; he brings me coffee in bed, asks me about my dreams, puts a new bell on my bike. Sometimes we’ll be playing Scrabble and he’ll notice my expression, ask if I’m sad and what I’m thinking before I even realize I’m thinking about her.

We don’t cry in public anymore, or not often. But December is a minefield. I find myself getting annoyed and upset, crying over nothing. It’s not nothing, though. It’s the one thing. The unfixable thing.

So what do I do? I go out to the beach, let the wind clear my head so I can talk to Kiki. I walk at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. They call the sand here sugar sand; it’s almost pure white, and if you look at it through a microscope, you see individual grains of milky quartz worn into ovals. The powdery sand is so fine it squeaks with each step when your bare heels sink down.

I love that squeaking sound. It has been a lot colder here than I expected, windy too, but that means the beach is nearly empty, except for one fisherman who’s here every day. A great blue heron is always by his side like a dog. The bird waits for free fish but I like to imagine the man and bird have a relationship.

If Kiki were to see them, she would say yes, of course they’re friends, and that heron is like Bug Eyes, one of our fat yellow chickens, one of the smartest, who used to come running when she saw Kiki, would jump in the air to pluck a French fry out of her hand, would settle down for a rest on her lap.

Walking past, I say to Kiki, “You saw that heron, didn’t you?”

I’m talking loud now, so she can hear me over the roar of waves and wind. I tell her I will listen in case she wants to send me a message. I remind myself to pay attention. A message can be a bird or a breeze or a shell. A message can be anything.

Tina Hedin is a writer from New Hampshire. She writes the Substack “Letters From Turkey Town.”

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